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Why Thanksgiving, the most unusual of holidays, is also the very best

Author of the article:

Calum Marsh

Publishing date:

October 10, 2019 • 4 minute read

"I remember Thanksgiving, now, as a time of warmth and fellow-feeling, of huge portions of extraordinarily rich and succulent foods."Photo by Getty ImagesMy family had never eaten Thanksgiving dinner before we moved to Canada in the early 1990s. I had never even heard of it. My mother, having seen it celebrated on American television, had a vague idea that it had something to do with Christmas — she seemed to remember snow and maybe Christmas trees. In England, in late September, we observed Harvest Day, or Harvest Festival, which is related to the Harvest Moon and the Autumn Equinox, but we never made much of that as a family, and we certainly never marked the holiday with a special meal. So when we moved here in early September, we were slightly bewildered by Thanksgiving. We had to learn it from scratch. We quickly discovered that Thanksgiving dinner has a precedent in British cuisine: The traditional Sunday roast, which we would have, not every week, but often enough that we knew how to feast on mashed potatoes and gravy, and generally overeat. Sunday roast with turkey instead of beef: That’s how I first started thinking about Thanksgiving dinner as a child, before we integrated many critical North American elements, such as stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s, eating Thanksgiving dinner with friends in college, that I realized the Yorkshire puddings I imagined ubiquitous were totally alien to most Canadians. Though hardly traditional, I still think of them as indispensable to any decent Thanksgiving meal.

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The turkey proved an essential distinction, needless to say. A native bird of North America, it was inevitable that the turkey, delicious and plentiful, should have become the staple dish of the holiday. Europeans had already been enjoying turkey for a century or more before it was ever associated with Thanksgiving; transported from Mexico to Spain by Cortes and the conquistadors in the early 16th century, they soon became popular in England and France, where they were misidentified as Indian (the French called them “coq d’Inde,” now simply “dinde”) or Turkish, hence the name.

When else during the calendar year can we come together, make merry, toast our fortune, and dine so exquisitely, without the various conventions and formalities of religious observance?

Later in the 16th century, the turkey supplanted the traditional goose (and, before that, boar) on English tables at Christmas, where dinner is customarily served in the early afternoon, along with roast potatoes, brussels sprouts and pudding. This became the standard quickly enough that, by the time Charles Dickens publishedA Christmas Carolin 1843, it was a given that Scrooge would dispatch a turkey to the Cratchit home after he awakens a changed man.

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In any case, my family knew all about preparing a turkey before our first encounter with the new October holiday — and indeed we welcomed the opportunity for yet more fowl. Once a year, sitting among strewn wrapping paper and under the pretence of religious ceremony, isn’t enough for the correct enjoyment of turkey. As it turned out, another bird in the fall is exactly what was called for. Roast turkey, generously stuffed, is one of the great comfort foods in all of North American cuisine, as pleasant and gratifying as any main course. And it is one of the great delights of Thanksgiving that it is a holiday built around the enjoyment of this abundant and flavourful meal. Of course, we all take a moment, amid the clatter of utensils and the rumbling of stomachs, to give thanks for good tidings and the presence of our loved ones, as custom naturally dictates. But as very few of us are in a position to celebrate a recent harvest, what we have gathered for, at heart, is honestly and unapologetically to enjoy one another’s company and eat enormous quantities of food.

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When else during the calendar year can we come together, make merry, toast our fortune, and dine so exquisitely, without the various conventions and formalities of religious observance? We hear a lot about the meaning of Christmas and commercialization subverting its true values — and there is a certain phoniness in the proceedings, enjoyable as Christmas can be, for those of us who aren’t practicing Christians. Most of the other statutory holidays in this part of the world, meanwhile, have either been manufactured too recently to matter (Family Day) or have no real attendant rituals (Victoria Day, Labour Day). As one of our few secular holidays of any real substance, Thanksgiving is the rare occasion when all of us can celebrate in earnest — besides which, we don’t even have to buy each other gifts.

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The earliest Thanksgivings my family celebrated in Canada were awkward as we got the hang of things. That first year, a month after we moved across the Atlantic, we ate with Bob, the widower whose spare rooms in his large home we rented while we saved for a place of our own. I remember Thanksgiving, now, as a time of warmth and fellow-feeling, of huge portions of extraordinarily rich and succulent foods. But it had less power than Christmas, had less monumental a hold on the imagination; that made it, in a way, freer, looser and more purely enjoyable. That’s how I think about it still.This year, I’m eating with a loose-knit group of friends without anywhere else to go — a bunch of single people, immigrants and orphans. It retains for me that unique quality, of seeming somehow a holiday apart. The most unusual of holidays, to me — it may in fact also be the best. View on Ottawa Citizen

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